Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys

This book explores how the novels by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), Between the Acts (1941), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – maintain an attachment to and love for life amid disenchanting times of war and social change. Drawing from Woolf’s and Rhys’s personal writings and fictions, Talviste demonstrates that Woolf and Rhys locate this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective and oddly intimate moments that function as cracks in the dominant patriarchal and imperial ideologies of Woolf’s and Rhys’s times. To theorise strange intimacy, this monograph rethinks the feminist works of Hélène Cixous, especially her attention to materiality, affect and embodiment, in the light of contemporary affect studies and new materialism.